The only way to figure out where Sen. John McCain stands on torture/waterboarding may be to waterboard him. For years, McCain told every media outlet willing to listen that Congress should ban the information-extraction method because it amounts to torture. It got McCain lots of face time on TV, the kind he always gets when he sides with Democrats in so-called “maverick” fashion.
McCain not only led the fight against waterboarding, but went one step further than that, lecturing President George W. Bush and telling eloquent stories of how he was tortured in Vietnam as a prisoner of war. The media ate that up, too.
“People who have worn the uniform and had the experience know this is a terrible and odious practice and should never be condoned in the U.S. We are better than that,” McCain told the Associated Press in October.
Then, in February, McCain pulled an amazing about-face and voted against a waterboarding/torture ban. At the time, he claimed that this was because he didn’t want the CIA limited to the methods used by the military in their field manual. Sounds great, but it essentially means that the CIA can employ torture.
Amazingly, after years of bashing Bush for supporting the torture of known terrorists, by the end of February, McCain was demanding that Bush veto the torture-ban bill passed by Congress. Bush did in the beginning of March. Less than a week later, when asked about it by the media, McCain came out and reaffirmed that he opposed waterboarding because it is technically illegal, a sentiment McCain didn’t share when he was calling for the waterboarding ban that he eventually voted against.
This could be McCain’s main weakness. He is a serial flip-flopper with a potentially terminal case of the wobblies. It is a near compulsive thing with him, a habit I figured his campaign staff would beat out of him as November got closer.
The Democrats, who appear to have figured this out, made McCain’s flip-flopping as big a part of the debate on waterboarding as the waterboarding itself. That got buried in coverage of scuffle between Clinton and Obama, but it is bound to come back.
All politicians flip-flop. At one point, on my radio show, we tracked Sen. Hillary Clinton’s ever morphing positions on how, when and to what extent she would withdraw from Iraq, which changed weekly, depending on which audience she was addressing.
Contrary to public perception, Sen. Barack Obama has taken at least three distinct positions on Iraq since 2002.
But McCain will not only lack any grounds to criticize the two, he will have a hard time defending his own record because he’s been so brazen about flip-flopping. Just a few months ago, he roasted one of his Republican primary opponents for suggesting he had ever supported “amnesty” for illegal aliens. But in a 2003 article in the Tucson Citizen headlined, “McCain Pushes Amnesty, Guest-Worker program,” McCain said the country should “set up a program where amnesty is extended to a certain number of people” who came here illegally so they could remain in the country. The McCain-Kennedy immigration bill of 2005 and several versions McCain backed afterward did just that.
Then in January, McCain said he had heard the American people on illegal immigration and their opposition to the McCain-Kennedy bill, and that he wouldn’t back anything like it again. A week later, when MSNBC Meet the Press host Tim Russert asked McCain what he would do as president if the Senate passed the McCain-Kennedy immigration bill or one like it, he said he’d sign it, but told people they didn’t need to worry because “it isn’t going to come.”
Incredibly, this fall, McCain’s campaign sent out a mailer attacking Republican primary opponent Mitt Romney for “refusing to endorse the Bush tax-cut plan.” It was a pretty bold move, considering McCain voted against the plan twice and was one of only two Republicans to oppose it. As with the waterboarding, McCain was one of the leaders of the largely Democrat-led crusade against the tax cuts, doing more than four dozen interviews and TV appearances trashing the plan. He was also quoted more than 50 times attacking the plan in major newspapers. Now McCain says he supports the tax cuts and believes they should be extended.
McCain’s history of compulsive flip-flopping stretches back a long time. He had long cast himself as an abortion opponent. Then, in 1999, McCain told the San Francisco Chronicle that in the short term, or even in the long term, he would not support the repeal of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion, because it would force women to have illegal and dangerous operations.
Two days later on CNN’s Late Edition, he said that he ultimately favored the repeal of Roe. When aides to McCain were grilled about the apparent discrepancy, they assured the public that he had not wavered from his long-held belief that Roe v. Wade should be repealed.
Make sense to you? If McCain keeps this up, it won’t make much sense to the public, either.
This article appears in Mar 26 – Apr 1, 2008.
